


Wear Your Heart on Your Wrists

by E_Salvatore



Series: Tagged: TBTP Tumblr Fics [11]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Enemy-Identifying Marks, F/M, Here be angst, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tumblr Fic, and you don't know which is which!, tumblr aus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6083901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore/pseuds/E_Salvatore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by <a href="http://eleanor-3.tumblr.com/post/139402305057/the-wonderful-jinx-radical-rin">this</a> conversation, which basically boils down to “what if you’re born with a name on each wrist - one is your true love, the other your greatest enemy?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wear Your Heart on Your Wrists

Richard Strand is born Nameless. 

It’s not cause for surprise; far from it, in fact – not all people are the same age as their soulmates (or their enemies). And typically – for men, at least – if you’re born with a Name, it’s not the one you want to go looking for.

Things don’t work the same way for most women. By the time he’s born, there are hundreds of papers written on this. They’re thought-provoking, to say the least. (Later on, he becomes leery of large age gaps, thinks of all the papers he’s read and the points they raise about the troubling nature of older men shaping younger women.)

Luckily, that’s not something Strand’s ever had to worry about.

A few days shy of his second birthday, a name inks itself upon his right wrist in spider-thin, flowery cursive.

_Coralee._

 

 

 

He doesn’t quite remember when the second name appears. 

A few years before Charlie, probably. Three or four years, give or take.

 _Alex_ shows up one day in blocky, all-caps print. The _A_ is slanted in an almost endearing way, like a child playing at being a grown-up. A grown-up who will someday become his enemy.

The other boys tease him relentlessly.

_Nice going, Richard!_

_You big bully!_

_Come on, what did that baby ever do to you?_

And then another boy in their class gets a Name – it’s his second Name, having received his first (Benjamin) at birth, and it’s a decidedly feminine name (Lula or Lily or Lana, something like that) – so everyone ignores Big Bully Richard to pick on Cradle Robber Johnny instead.

He worries about it for a while (his father says his mother never had a second Name, says she was gentle as a baby bird and could never have hated someone and Richard wants to be his mother, he _needs_ to be his mother and not his father) but then he’s a high school graduate–college freshman–expecting father–father–single father and the only name he cares about is  _Charlie the one good thing in my life._

Besides, there are too many Alexs in the world for him to be on the lookout for a particular one.

 

 

 

He knows her name the second their eyes meet, five whole minutes before he plucks up the courage to cross the room and introduce himself. 

_Coralee._

This is not how it was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to be a jaded, tired, broken mess of a man when he met her. He wasn’t supposed to be half-asleep, running on caffeine, barely able to string together enough words to even attempt to lace them with charm. He wasn’t supposed to be the father of a three-year-old.

None of that matters to Coralee. She is _perfect_ and the first time he touches her hand, his heart stops and his lungs burn and his stomach drops. It feels like an omen, like the start of something disastrous but how can it be with her name on his right wrist and his name on her right wrist?

A matching set, right down to their cursive signatures.

Coralee is bright and vibrant and kind, patient and supportive and loving, all the things a stressed-out college senior and his toddler could ask for. She takes to Charlie as if the girl were her own, fits seamlessly into the half-complete jigsaw puzzle of their life as if she was always meant to be there (and wasn’t she? Wasn’t she destined to somehow end up at this point ever since the day her name penned itself into his skin?).

One thing stands out: Coralee has one Name – his name – and no more. But _of course_ Coralee – sweet, innocent, mild-mannered Coralee – wouldn’t have an enemy. He can hardly remember anything about his mother (taken from him the day he was born) but in Coralee, he sees traces of the woman gentle as a baby bird, the woman who could never have hated anyone.

She gets Charlie’s name inked on her left wrist, kisses the girl’s nose the day she comes home with the tattoo and proudly declares the both of them the loves of her life. If anyone deserves to have two loves, it’s Coralee.

Strand looks at the Name on his left wrist, rubs at it the way one does at a mosquito bite while they still have enough restraint to keep from clawing at their own skin, considers getting something else printed over it to cover up the fact that he is capable of hate and darkness and whatever pain he will someday cause the mysterious Alex.

 

 

 

By the time he meets Alex Reagan, he’s long since stopped adding every Alex he crosses paths with to the list of possible nemeses. That’s not to say that he doesn’t surreptitiously try to get a glimpse of her wrists, of course, but there’s no point to it. 

“That’s an interesting choice.” He comments casually, gesturing at the cluster of vines on her hands. They start at her wrists – dense knots of greenery that effectively obscure her Names – and thin out as they crawl upward, leaving only a few delicate tendrils of green to make it to the inside of her elbow.

Alex flinches when she notices his eyes on her tattoos. They’ve only known each other for a while, perhaps not long enough for him to comment on the designs she’s chosen to wear on her skin. He considers an apology and quickly decides one might be in order, but she recovers before he can get so much as a _sorry, I didn’t mean to pry_ out.

“I don’t believe in them. The Names, I mean,” She clarifies. “I think all they do is cause unnecessary worry and pain.“

“Really?”

She laughs. “I know, I know – it’s an unpopular opinion. But look at it this way: we spend our whole lives freaking out about these things, wondering if we’re ever going to meet one Name, dreading the day we meet the other one. I can’t live like that, constantly waiting and fearing.”

This is slowly becoming his favorite part of getting to know her: having a conversation when she isn’t recording and asking questions and attacking his life’s work, when she’s free to share her opinions and offer him surprisingly insightful takes on the workings of their world. “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Alex shrugs. “Besides, it makes things super awkward when you’re dating someone with the wrong name. Every relationship starts to feel like a ticking time bomb. Like I said: a whole lot of unnecessary worry and pain.”

He thinks of Coralee, thinks of the great love that was supposed to last all his life, thinks of all the things he took for granted because of that assumption. He thinks of the Name still on his wrist, the constant reminder of his loss, the crushing fear that he’ll be forced to carry her name and her memory for the rest of his days.

For someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts and demons, it’s probably high time for him to take a page out of Alex’s book and stop believing in magic tattoos.

 

 

 

What most people don’t realize about skepticism is how _liberating_ it is. 

Start questioning those shadows at the end of the hallway and suddenly your eight-year-old mind conjures up a dozen other explanations, none of them supernatural. Start questioning an omnipotent creator and suddenly you can cast off the shackles of a pre-determined destiny, take life into your own hands. Start telling yourself that magical tattoos are utterly ridiculous and suddenly, for the first time since you learned to pronounce the first Name on your wrist, you can push those Names to the back of your mind and stop thinking about them entirely.

It’s easy to get addicted to freedom, easy to overdo things, easy to take it so far that it turns into keeping both eyes shut and walking a thin line between skepticism and willful ignorance.

Strand has this down to a science.

The Names on his wrists remain bold as ever, stubbornly staining his skin with curlicues of loss and predictions of strife. What changes is the way he sees them – or rather, does _not_ see them. He resolves to set aside childish belief in some sort of matchmaking higher power and that, as they say, is that. In this case: out of mind, out of sight.

Until he catches sight of Alex’s left wrist one day, and swears he sees the beginning of a familiar  _R_. Alex follows his gaze and frowns at her wrist, pulls down her sleeve and says something about faded ink and needing to get it touched up. They do not speak of what he saw, what she knows he saw, what he knows she knows he saw.

But he thinks of it sometimes, feels the burn of those four letters on his wrist until he gives in one day and rubs at it the way one does at a mosquito bite while they still have enough restraint to keep from clawing out their own skin, considers getting something else printed over it to cover up the fact that for the second time in his life, a Name is slowly clawing her way into his heart and it isn’t going to end well.

At least he’ll see it coming this time.

 

 

 

Some people live their whole lives with only one Name, because they were born with hearts incapable of hatred. Some people live their whole lives with only one Name, because they were born with hearts incapable of love.

Coralee, he’s quickly realizing, is the latter.

“Were you really so blinded by me that you didn’t notice the shadows in my wake?” She laughs from across the crumbling courtyard, her voice echoing into the night as she advances with her fleet of dark figures. They are all long robes–long limbs–long claws and they are all _hers_. “Did you never realize that the day I came into your life was the day everything went cold?”

He remembers her smile – bright enough to light up the room – and her laugh – warm enough to light up his life – and (decades too late) he remembers his heart stopping and his lungs burning and his stomach dropping. 

It was a bad omen all along.

“Richard, come on!” Alex hisses viciously, pulls at his arm so sharply she might’ve dislocated something, sets a pace so fast he can barely keep up.

His lungs burn and his eyes burn and his wrists burn.

 _Coralee_ seems to pulse in time with the sharp click of her heels against the ancient stones.

 _Alex_ drums the frantic beat of hunted prey into his skin, an echo of the pulse he can feel where his fingers encircle her wrist.

When he tries to pull her wrist closer, it has the inadvertent effect of slowing her down. “Strand!” Alex snaps, pulling her hand – and his – back into her control.

“Show me your wrist.”

“What?” They’ve reached the edge of the castle, and Alex’s head whips back and forth as she tries to regain her orientation and remember where they left the car.

“Alex, show me your wrist.”

She makes a split-second decision as Coralee’s demons grow close enough to permeate the air with their thick musk, making a sharp and sudden left that leads them down the thinner-looking patch of forest. It’s probably the right choice; Alex has always had a great sense of direction. “Richard, now is _really_ not the time.” She’s also good at managing her priorities.

Strand, on the other hand, is still dealing with the fact that his wife is alive, that hers is the Name he should’ve been dreading all along, that she’s an ancient archdemon who’d planned to play him out from the very beginning.

He’s also pretty stunned by the revelation that Alex is _the_ Name. And now, more clearly than ever before, he recalls the _R_ he’d caught a glimpse of one day.

“Just show me your wrist!” Strand demands as they burst into a clearing. Alex stops to catch her breath, and he takes this opportunity to wrench her hand from where it’s pressed to her chest and holds it up to the pale moonlight that floods their surroundings.

The green hasn’t faded but under such close scrutiny, it does a miserable job of covering up the thick, heavy scrawl of her Name.

His name.

 _Richard_ , her left wrist reads. _Alex_ , his left wrist sighs. When he holds them side by side, he almost laughs at the contrast between their handwritings but this is right, this is real, this is them, hopelessly mismatched and yet…

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He whispers, his thumb tracing circles over the familiar penmanship on her wrist. “Alex, why didn’t you-”

She chokes on a sob.

“What’s wrong?” He drops her hand to frame her face, pushing aside wayward curls. “What is it? Why are you crying?”

There are stories, whispers of Names on skin yet not in heart. It would be just his luck for this to happen. She’s not happy, she doesn’t love him, she-

Alex offers him her right hand.

And there, in a perfect mirror of her left wrist, in a swirl of vines and leaves and black ink –

_Richard._

“I don’t believe in Names,” Alex insists through tears. “I don’t _want_ to believe.”

But if tonight’s taught him anything, it’s that no one has any hope of escaping the manacles of black ink and certain heartbreak.

**Author's Note:**

> One last thing: A HUGE APOLOGY for vilifying Coralee! It was all for dramatic effect, of course. I have been known to be a Coralee-sympathizer and until we actually hear from her, the jury's out for me.


End file.
